Chapter 48

“Carter, no!”
His hand roughly covers my mouth, cutting off anything else I intended to say as he drives his cock inside me. I close my eyes and groan, relieved that he stole my ability to speak. It’s getting harder and harder to beg him to stop when all I want is for him to keep going.
“Not another fucking word out of you,” he says roughly, his fist tightening as he yanks my hair.
God, yes.
I shake my head and try to utter a muffled no, but his hand is closed over my mouth too tightly. He draws back and pistons into the tight, hot wetness between my shaking legs and I cry out against his hand. My whole body needs release more than it needs even the most basic necessities. I’ll give up oxygen for the next two minutes and take my chances if he’ll just let me come.
Carter moves his hand from my mouth after only a minute, telling me, “I hear your voice, I smack your ass. Keep your mouth shut.”
“Fuck you,” I spit back.
His low growl sends a thrill down my spine, then Carter’s hand comes down across my ass and I let out a little yelp, clutching his bed sheets and holding on for dear life as he fucks me harder. I’m too close to the edge of the bed for him to be thrusting this hard. It’s hard to think straight when he takes me like this, but a sudden awareness of how much closer I’m moving to the edge with every thrust has me grabbing for purchase and trying to stop him, for real.
“Carter, wait.”
He ignores me, pounding into me even harder.
“Carter, stop,” I call out, unsure how to get his attention. “I’m serious, I need to—”
With one more brutal drive, he sends me right off the edge of the bed. My arms shoot out and I catch myself on the ground a split second after our bodies disconnect. I roll to a sitting position and start to laugh, feeling stupid for literally falling off his bed, but Carter cuts off my laughter, grabbing me and shoving me down on the floor.
Oh, shit.
I’m not sure how it’s possible, but I feel myself get even wetter. Before I can utter a sound, he grabs my hips, positions me, and shoves his cock back inside me. My insides explode with sensation and I try to put my palms on the floor to brace myself, but as soon as I try, he knocks my hand out from under me and pushes me down face first.
“Ass up.”
Lust coils through me, even as he moves inside me. I don’t know what he’s doing to me, but I can’t get enough tonight. Maybe he needs it more than usual and my body is responding to that. I love to give him what he needs. I love to be what he needs. He’s the one with two rounds left, and I’m the one dreading the last time this happens.
The last time.
Sadness lands like a boulder in my gut. Even if I let him keep playing these games with me for the rest of senior year, it has to end when he goes off to college. We’re going to school too far apart, and I know firsthand now, Carter will not go without sex. If he can’t get it from me, he’ll get it elsewhere. Long distance won’t work with him. No way.
My own thoughts screw me over, dampening the arousal that has been building since Carter got me back to his house after the movie I swore I wouldn’t go to with him. We were barely inside his bedroom when he told me to get on my knees and pay my debt. As expected, a blow job turned into sex, and the sex got dirty. It’s hard to build to a climax when you’re dousing yourself in sadness though, and Carter isn’t in a giving mood tonight to begin with.
I can tell by his increased speed and the guttural noises as he takes my pussy that he’s getting close. Shit. I missed my chance. Stupid brain, wandering too far off base.
Sure enough, a moment later, Carter drives deep and groans as he shoots his release inside me. I clench my feminine muscles, squeezing him as he does, trying to maximize his pleasure.
When he finishes, he collapses beside me on the floor and pulls me into his arms. I snuggle close and rest my head on his bicep. It’s not a comfy pillow, and the floor certainly isn’t as welcoming as the bed, but I know he just came, so he’s probably not eager to stand up and relocate right now. I’m feeling cuddly anyway, so I wrap my arms around him and hold him close.
Once he catches his breath and his heartbeat returns to a steady pace, he looks over and asks me, “You all right?”
With a little smile, I nod my head. “Yeah.”
“I couldn’t tell if you meant it this time,” he admits, looking up at the ceiling. “When you were asking me to stop.”
“Oh. Well, I did, but only because I could feel myself about to fall off the bed. If I’m going to have bruises from you fucking me, I’d prefer it not be because I fell off the bed.”
That catches his attention and he looks over at me, slightly alarmed. “Have I bruised you?”
“Just a little. Barely worth mentioning. Sometimes you grab a little harder than I think you mean to, and you have the strong hands of an athlete, go figure. I get the occasional thumb print.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
I smile faintly. “It’s not a big deal. It’s usually not anywhere someone would see it, anyway. Maybe if I’m wearin’ a bikini, but oddly enough, I don’t spend a lot of time in a bikini.”
“You should,” he advises. “We do have a pool, you know.”
“Chlorine does unpleasant things to my hair,” I inform him. Then, dragging a finger saucily down his chest, I add, “Besides, if we went swimming alone, I’m sure we would both be naked.”
Carter smiles, curling his arm to drag me closer so he can give me a kiss. “Good point. You don’t need a bikini. The fewer clothes on you, the better.”
I sigh with pleasure as he bends his head and starts kissing my neck again.
“Want to hear something funny?” he asks.
“Sure,” I answer.
“My mom asked me this morning if you were pregnant. Heard it around town.”
I sigh heavily. “Hilarious. Did she tell your dad? Should I be on the lookout for a hitman now?”
“Nah. They don’t handle unwanted teen moms with hitmen, a checkbook is their weapon of choice. You wouldn’t be unwanted anyway though. If we had a baby, it would be different. We’re more or less old enough for that now.”
“Okay. I’m gonna reiterate one more time that I am not pregnant.”
“I know, I just thought it was funny hearing my own rumor echoed back to me.”
“I’m just tickled, let me tell you.”
Shrugging unrepentantly, he says, “Shouldn’t have told me you were fucking someone else.”
“I didn’t. I told you I went out with someone else, and I’m not you. A date doesn’t necessarily lead to sex with me.”
“No kidding,” he says, as if I made him wait an eternity. “Sex doesn’t always lead to dates, either. You’re a weird girl.”
Since he has given me an opening to ask a question I’ve been tempted to ask, I set aside my wariness of the answer and take the plunge. “Anyway, you’re the one who actually went out with someone else,” I begin, lightly enough, considering how hard my heart pounds as those words tumble out of my mouth.
“‘Went out with’ might be an overstatement. We didn’t go anywhere, I just used her to fuck with you.”
He’s so fucking mean sometimes, I swear. Not even to me in this instance, but to stupid Jenna. “You didn’t like her at all?” I question, heart in my throat. Despite being grounded in reason much of the time, my heart thuds like its continuing function depends upon his answer. Stupid, stupid heart.
His dark gaze locks with mine and he shakes his head in such a way that I feel foolish for asking. Even though it’s completely possible he could have liked that girl, the look on his face tells me otherwise. “I like you,” Carter answers, simply.
“Have you slept with her or anyone else since me?”
“Not yet.”
My heart soars and then stalls at his answer. Such a bittersweet reminder that he could, if he wanted to, but he doesn’t—yet.
In a sense, for me at least, it feels like that is when it will really be over between us. That is when whatever ties us together will dissolve, when I will actually be free to move on with my life and veer in a direction that leads entirely away from him.
It’s hard to imagine grasping that any other way. It will happen when he sleeps with another girl, because I sure as hell won’t be the one jumping into bed with anyone else right on the heels of whatever this is.
He will, though. He did already, when I didn’t put out expediently enough to satisfy his baser needs.
“You know me. If I had wanted to get off, I would’ve made you do it, not called in a sub.”
His words that night come back to mind. I’m mulling them over, trying to put together an impossible puzzle. How do I have Carter and also some semblance of safety? How do I ask him not to sleep with anyone else, without promising to meet his needs myself? For that matter, how do I ask him not to see anyone else—period—if I’m not ready to jump back into being his girlfriend? I can’t. It wouldn’t be fair.
My head and my heart couldn’t be further apart on this issue, though, and before I can stop it, my heart recklessly throws a hand on the wheel and hurls us around a scary corner. “I don’t want you to.”
His eyebrows rise in surprise at my frankness, while my formerly ballsy heart drops right down into my stomach. “Then you want to get back together.”
No. That’s too scary. I shake my head, dropping my gaze to his chest so I don’t have to look him in the eye.
“You’re gonna have to help me out here, babe. I don’t know what you want,” he tells me.
I want a time machine that can travel back to the night he told me nothing happened between him and Erika, and I want him to tell me the truth instead. Or a trip ahead in time, so I can see if giving him another chance would lead to a much deeper heartache down the road.
I don’t always need to be comfortable, but I really hate feeling stupid, and if I give him another chance and he ends up cheating on me, there are not words for how unbelievably foolish I will feel.
“I don’t have anything new to offer you, Carter, I was just being honest,” I explain. “I like that you and I can always be honest with one another, even if the truth isn’t pretty. I like that we’re not afraid to talk about anything, no matter how messed up, and I feel like that’s a large part of what I lost. That’s why our relationship stopped working for me. Maybe you need sex more, but I need openness and an unshakeable mutual trust. I don’t need you to be that way with anyone else, but I do need you to trust me, and to know I can trust you. You never lost your supply, but I did. I stopped getting what I needed out of us, so… yeah, I still have conflicted feelings, and I still care about you, but that’s where we are. Nothing you’ve done since has given me back that feeling I had before, that… awe. I don’t want you to be with anyone else, I don’t want to watch you move on, but I don’t want to take another chance on you, either. That means it’s over, and at the end of the day, you will move on. Maybe then it will be easier for me to move past this.”
“Okay, that’s not entirely true. Most of it is,” he amends, before I get defensive. “I know I’m going to sound like an asshole saying this, but you claim my supply was never interrupted, that I got everything I needed from you, but…” He trails off, uncharacteristically hesitant.
I brace myself, knowing something unpleasant is coming my way.
“I didn’t know we were going to have sex that weekend, Zoey. When I went to her house, I had no idea where you and I were heading. Don’t get me wrong, I like the occasional blow job as much as the next guy, but I didn’t know I’d get you into bed so fast. You have the reputation for being a stuck-up virgin who spends her free time at church, for Christ’s sake. I figured it would take a little longer to wear you down, and I didn’t really want to go without while I was waiting. That’s the truth. It’s selfish and ugly, but yeah, I do have needs, Zoey. I’m not a slave to them, I wouldn’t have cheated on you once we were together, but we weren’t quite together yet. The timing was shit, and if I had known I could have you if I just waited another couple of days, obviously I would take it all back. I wouldn’t have gone to her house. I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I should’ve been honest with you. I should’ve known that you could take it, and I’m really sorry I lied instead. I know better now.”
“Did you sleep with her?” I ask.
“No,” he answers, seriously.
“Did she go down on you? Or get you off another way? Any variation of sex acts between you two?”
“Nothing happened beyond kissing. I got a copy of the video, I can show you the proof if you want to finish watching it. Well, listening to it.”
I shake my head. “No, I never want to see that again.”
Grabbing my hand and interlocking our fingers, he says, “Nothing happened, Zoey.”
“She said she got you off,” I remind him.
“She was lying to rile you up. That part was not true. Even showing you the video was a calculated bluff, because if you had kept watching, you would have heard me come around to my senses and leave.”
I want to fire more questions at him while he’s being open again, but I don’t really know what to do with the answers. After the scene at lunch, Kasey filled in all the gaps in my knowledge. Apparently, someone confessed to the principal that they saw drugs in Erika’s locker when she had it open. An unannounced locker search—which Kasey sent me the picture of some part of—turned up a plastic bag filled with narcotics. Erika swore she was innocent, that she didn’t do drugs and had no idea where those had come from.
She was suspended from the cheer squad, pending a drug test. If it comes back clean, she will be reinstated. If it doesn’t, she will be kicked off the squad permanently, possibly suspended from school, and she could even face criminal charges.
“Did Erika do drugs?” I ask.
“Has she ever? Sure.”
I give him a droll look. “No, not has she ever. Are you responsible for what’s going on with her right now? The drugs in her locker? Getting kicked off the squad?”
He shrugs. “She should have known better than to fuck with me. I warned her more than once. At a certain point, you have to act or no one believes you anymore.”
“So, you framed her. Just to scare her? What happens when the drug test comes back clean and she’s back on the squad this week? She’s gonna be pissed.”
“Who says she’s going to pass the drug test?” he asks, rhetorically.
“She’s not doing drugs. Your rewording of my question said as much.”
“She won’t be back on the cheer squad,” he says, simply. “She’s done. Suspended for the rest of the season, just like her buddy Jake.”
“I got Jake suspended because he was sexually inappropriate with me. He violated actual codes of conduct. That’s not the same thing,” I tell him.
“Erika cost me you,” he says, simply. “That’s a good enough reason for me.”
In a twisted way, that’s kind of sweet. Still, my better intentions win out and I tell him, “I don’t want this. I appreciate the gesture, I think, but I don’t want or need you to take her down to punish her for showing me the video. It was a bitchy thing to do, but—”
“It’s too late now,” he assures me. “She’s off the squad. She’s done.” His arms tighten around my waist. “I don’t want to talk about her anymore.”
“Don’t go after anyone else. Please,” I add, shooting him my best puppy dog eyes. “Stop being destructive.”
Gazing at me with a gleam of mischief in his eyes, he asks, “What’ll you give me for it?”
“Why do I have to give you anything for it? It’s not for me.”
“You want to be a defender of the people, you pay the piper.”
“Fine. I’ll go to homecoming with you,” I offer. I gave away my dress money, but I could probably find something at a thrift shop, or maybe borrow a dress from Grace. I know she doesn’t want to wear the dress she wore last year, but I kind of liked it. Maybe I could give her some money for that one, then she could use the money toward a new gown for this year.
Carter shakes his head. “A big ask demands a bigger payment than that. Homecoming, stay the night with me tonight, and promise you’ll still go to New York with me after state, no matter what happens between now and then.”
Immediately suspicious, I narrow my eyes. “You mean no matter how many other girls you sleep with. No, I won’t agree to that.”
Giving my side a light squeeze, Carter remarks, “For someone who supposedly doesn’t want to be part of it, you are very concerned with my sex life.”
“I’m prepared to do homecoming and I can probably stay the night tonight, but that’s it. New York is not on the table.”
“Then I don’t stop terrorizing your friends,” he says, simply. “New York is non-negotiable to me. It’s what I was working toward all along. If New York is a no, it’s open season. I can do whatever, because I’m not going to get what I want at the end of the day anyway.”
“Why are you so set on me going to New York with you?” I ask, shaking my head.
“I told you I’d take you there. I know you want to go. When will you go, if not with me?”
I have no answer to that. “I can’t afford to go on an impromptu trip to New York, and it’s not right to expect you to pay my way when I’m not even your girlfriend.”
“Money is not your issue,” Carter states, dismissing my smoke screen. “Sex is your issue. You immediately dumped me when you thought I might’ve been with someone else, and now you’ve decided your feelings for me dissolve if I sleep with anyone else, even though we’re not together. You don’t want me if my dick gets hard for anyone but you. This is your possessive side coming out, doesn’t have a damn thing to do with money.”
“Fine, maybe it is,” I admit. “You don’t want anyone else touching me either, do you? I’m not alone in feeling that way.”
“The difference is, I’m not asking you to be celibate; I am happy to fuck you any time you want it. The road doesn’t go both ways. You make me bargain for sex. I have to wreak havoc in order to get you into bed, and then I have to budget our encounters so I don’t use them all up at once. All you have to do is shoot me a text. That doesn’t work for me. You are the only one I want to fuck, but if you’re not on the table, you can’t expect me to turn into a monk. That’s not going to happen.”
An ugly kind of fury burns through me at the thought of another girl in my place, of him kissing, touching, burying himself inside anyone but me. I don’t know what to do about it, but I don’t want that to happen. I especially don’t want it to happen unexpectedly and then be something I find out about later.
An idea bursts open inside of me, unsettling my tummy, but I open my mouth and let the words tumble out before I can stop myself. “Since when has me not wanting it ever stopped you? If you need to fuck someone and you’re not willing to wait any longer…” I trail off, swallowing, unsure what exactly I’m suggesting or how he’ll receive it. Part of me thinks he might tire of working so hard for me, but hell, it’s not like he’s a piece of cake, either.
His predatory instincts surface and he rolls me onto my back, moving on top of me. “Go ahead and finish that thought, princess. If I’m at a party with some girl who’s ready to go, I should, what? Leave her there and come see you? What if once I’m there, you tell me no?”
“Take it anyway.”
My heart gallops, giving him permission like that. We don’t have any kind of system set up where I can interrupt if no really does mean no that time, no safe escape if I want out of the moment. There is none of that with him, so it’s more dangerous to set him loose. He could potentially end up forcing me to do something I really don’t want to do, and even if I want it now, there’s no way of stopping him later if I change my mind. I have a feeling he only needs one yes, and telling him “no” ten thousand times after that would fall on deaf ears.
His voice is low, but so intimate, my bones turn to jelly as he murmurs, “Yeah? Even if I think you mean it?”
It was a terrifying ledge to tiptoe up to, a deeply buried truth I didn’t want to confess, but now that we’re here and I’ve already taken the leap, I feel bolder, freer in telling him the twisted truth. “Even if I mean it. I would rather you force me than sleep with someone else. I know you’d take care of me after, if something went wrong. Whatever happens between you and me, I can handle. I just don’t want you with anyone else.”
His fingers burrow into my hair as he cradles my head, pulling me in for a soft, tender kiss. I’m vulnerable in the wake of such an admission, so I drink in the affection like it’s the drug I need to live. When he ends the kiss, he stays close and murmurs huskily against my lips. “Do you know what you’ve done, princess? You just gave me the keys to the kingdom. There’s no stopping me now.”
I swallow, so aware of the truth of that statement. I knew that when I said it, though. I may not be ready to trust him with my heart again, but I do trust him with my body. I’m not afraid he’ll break that.
“I know,” I answer, softly, meeting his gaze. “I don’t want you to stop.”
For a moment, he just looks at me. As he does, he soaks up every last doubt I might have about the choice I just made, the big and the small. He might like to call me his plaything, but he doesn’t look at me like a toy. He looks at me like a treasure. Like the heavens opened up and dropped me into his lap, and he’s forever grateful for the gift, even if he doesn’t express it with words. Even if his way of loving is sometimes brutal and scarring, even if he is more predator than prince, somehow he is the perfect fit for me.
I don’t know what that says about me, but I don’t really care, either.
“I love you, Zoey.”
My heart gives, then flies high in my chest. I’ve never really expected to hear those words from his lips, and certainly not on this fucked up time table where we’re not even together. It doesn’t matter, though. We don’t have to be together to love each other. I have a feeling none of the rules of ordinary relationships will ever apply to us, unless we want them to. Whatever cloth he’s cut from, it’s not a normal one, and that’s fine with me. I love his abnormality. I love him just the way he is.
Smiling softly, I reach out and push a hand through his hair, guiding his face close to mine again. I kiss his lips tenderly a few times, then I tell him, “I love you, too.”